by Nathan Jones
Likable or not, Able wasn't best pleased about the man putting him on the spot like that with such an obvious open-ended hint. But since the Ultimatum he'd come to a better appreciation that what goes around comes around; he'd been the one holding his hand out for help as often as not since nukes destroyed civilization and EMPs sent what was left back into the 1800s.
He and Wendy wouldn't be here today without the help of strangers.
Still, old as Simon was he still seemed strong enough, and there was a field that needed turning over. “You want to grab a spade and help me get the planting done, I'd be happy to invite you to dinner,” Able offered.
“I'd be pleased take you up on that.” The older man leaned against the fence, more weary than casual, and sighed. “Don't suppose you'd want to take me on long term? I'm living hand to mouth here.”
He certainly looked to be, with nothing to his name but those ratty clothes on his back, a worn saddle, and a horse past her prime. He didn't even seem to have a gun, which meant he was putting his life in his hands traveling these parts.
The Northern League patrolled around Lone Valley, sure, but bandits had been quick to take up where Sangue left off, and nowhere was completely safe these days. Even Able had been forced to chase off a lowlife or two since the war ended, and he counted his blessings no larger group of bandits had ever troubled his humble farm.
“You know I would if I could, friend, but hand to mouth's an affliction that's struck a lot of people these days,” Able told him apologetically. “Me and the wife are barely scraping by as is.”
Simon sighed and sagged against the fence. “I'm afraid I might even have to go so far as to sell the old girl,” he said in a mournful tone, reaching over to pat the mare's neck again. “She's closer to nag than racehorse, sure, but she's seen me through some tough times.” He sighed, looking older all of a sudden. “Not this one, though. Course, that depends on if I could ever find anyone with the precious metals to buy her.”
Well now, that caught his attention. “You'd sell your horse for gold or silver?” he asked in surprise. The bloodies had been gone for long enough that trade was starting to pick up again, sure, but even so most folks still played it safe with bartering.
They remembered all too well how worthless precious metals had been not long ago.
Simon nodded, smiling ruefully. “I was headed north, making for the League. Hoping against hope the peace and prosperity might've encouraged them to finally open their borders. I hear they trade in gold and silver sometimes.”
Able had heard the same, although that didn't matter much since the Northern League hadn't opened their borders and didn't seem like they ever would. Unless of course you were a bigger town like Brettonville or New Emery, or on the League's good side like Lone Valley, and the reclusive cusses were willing to send vehicles outside their territory for more lucrative trade runs.
Meanwhile his and Wendy's farm, practically on the border, couldn't get the League to trade with them on their most generous day. The best Able could hope for was to haul their harvest to Lone Valley, maybe barter for some of the scraps from those trading runs once the ranchers and shopkeepers were done picking over the best stuff.
“Well, you'd have to have a silver tongue or the reputation of a town like Venture or New Emery behind you to manage that,” he told his guest. “Otherwise the best you could hope for is that someone in Lone Valley would be willing to take precious metals hoping to trade them on to the League merchants.”
For some reason Simon's expression had briefly soured at the mention of New Emery, although he quickly replaced it with a rueful smile. “A silver tongue I might manage . . . Lone Valley, huh?”
“Yeah.” Able was staring thoughtfully at the man's horse. Bess, had he called her?
As it happened, he and his wife had been sitting on some jewelry they'd come into a while back. During the height of Sangue's depredations, when desperate folk had been willing to trade ounces of gold and precious gems for a week's worth of food. Sometimes even a single meal.
If Simon was talking about selling his horse . . .
Well, old Thompson a half day's walk away had that plow, which would let Able get the planting done in a fraction of the time. Even double the size of his crop, if he was feeling ambitious. And he could rig up the handcart he used for the backbreaking trip to haul his harvest to Lone Valley to be pulled by a horse.
Having that mare, even getting up in years as she was, could change his and his wife's lives. If this fellow was actually desperate enough to sell his mount for precious metals; Able might feel bad about such an uneven trade, but better he made it than some other lucky fellow did. After all, Thompson already had a mule and the folks in Lone Valley were doing just fine.
He cleared his throat. “Say, exactly what did you have in mind when it came to selling your horse?”
✽✽✽
Simon caught the gun belt Lobo threw him, buckling it back around his waist where it belonged.
Amazing how folks got so eager to cheat someone else that they became willfully blind to the possibility they might be getting cheated themselves. Told you something about people that did.
“Seeing as you're back without Johnny's nag,” Franco drawled sarcastically, looking up from the stick he was whittling with his big skinning knife, “I'm guessing you pulled off your little scheme?”
“You guess correctly,” he replied, moving over to his own spirited four-year-old mare and patting her neck. He fished a small, dirt-crusted vinyl bag, probably once used to carry tent stakes or something like that before being buried full of valuables, out of his pocket and shook it so it jingled. “And here's what I've got to show for it.”
“I still don't get the point of that entire song and dance, boss,” Lobo whined. “Why not just rob them?”
“Not getting the point's why I'm in charge and you're asking stupid questions,” Simon shot back. Lobo . . . what a ridiculous name; he'd never seen anyone less worthy to be compared to a swift, nimble, dangerous wolf. And the numbskull was actually proud to be called that.
But from the look of the rest of his boys, they also had yet to arrive at the point. He bit back a sigh and continued. “Hammer's nice for pounding nails, but liable to smash a stained-glass window if you tried to paint with it.”
One of his men swore. “What's that supposed to mean, boss?”
“It means you use the right tool for the right situation. Force is great for a lot of things, but sometimes it causes more hassle than it's worth.”
“And swindling some yokel out of his valuables is less hassle than just stealing the stuff?” Lobo demanded.
Simon hefted the bag of valuables in his hand. It came closer to being a fair price for the horse than he'd expected, which was a pleasant surprise. Good to know he hadn't gone to all that trouble for table scraps. Speaking of which, the cooked meal the farmers had tossed into the deal had been awfully nice, too.
“In case the dirt didn't make it obvious, this little sack was buried,” he said idly. “Out in the middle of nowhere, off the yokel's land, with no hint where to find it. We could've torn that miserable little farmhouse apart and not had anything to show for all the hard work more useful than pots or pans. And you think the farmers would've admitted they had valuables without a bit of encouraging?”
“I wouldn't have minded “encouraging” the missus, if she was a looker,” Franco growled.
Simon chose to ignore that. There were some things about this business that still left him unsettled, even after all this time. But if he wanted to stay in charge of men of this sort, he couldn't always stop them from doing those things. And to be fair, he'd done plenty of things himself he wasn't proud of. But he could blame that on the folks who'd forced him into this life in the first place.
And oh, he did.
In any case, where he could he tried to game situations to prevent his men being their worst selves, which was pretty vile. Like with this horse swap caper. Although he w
ould've killed that farmer if he'd had to. The wife too, even if he wouldn't have been best pleased to do it.
But he hadn't had to. Best keep it that way. “Looker?” he said, curling his lip. “She was hit by the ugly stick almost as hard as your ma. Although that never stopped me with her.”
His boys chortled at that and Franco darkened, eyes narrowing dangerously. Simon turned away, continuing. “This way we get what we want, steal the horse back in the night, and avoid the trouble that comes from robbing and killing folks. Unless the farmers are complete idiots they'll know I stole back the horse, but they can't prove anything and we'll be long gone. Most likely their friends will just laugh at them for suckers for getting taken in, and that'll be the end of it.”
“Robbing and killing's the entire point,” Lobo said with a frown.
“Only if you want to eventually get run down and strung up by a posse led by some veteran of the war,” he shot back.
“Like your buddy Trapper?” Franco taunted.
Simon forced down a flash of incandescent rage. He had no idea how his gang had found out about that, but he'd had to beat a few men down who'd waved it in his face. Unfortunately, Franco wasn't the sort to take a beating without coming at you in the night to slit your throat as you slept. He required a more . . . diplomatic approach.
So he hid his fury behind an easy smile as he turned to the man. “Anyway, this is the point.” He upended the bag so a wave of glittering rings, necklaces, and earrings poured out onto the dirt in front of him. That caught his men's attention, and they leaned forward eagerly as he continued. “Making enough so that we can eventually retire, get out before some do-gooder puts a noose around our necks.”
“Not a bad haul, boss,” Lobo admitted, stirring the valuable pile around with the toe of his boot.
“Not bad at all,” Simon agreed as he crouched to scoop up his share of the loot. “So take it easy the rest of the day, boys. Tonight we'll take back Johnny's nag, then we'll be long gone to better pickings.”
“Where?” Franco demanded.
He gave the ugly SOB a wide grin. “Lone Valley.” Able wasn't the only one who'd said the place was booming. And if there was one thing he knew about prosperity, it was that it made for easy pickings.
The only kind he was interested in.
✽✽✽
Skyler reined Junior in, keen eyes taking in the expanse of grasslands stretching out in front of him at the foot of the mountains to the west.
So this was Lone Valley, in what had once been the State of Wyoming. By all accounts the most fertile place in post-Ultimatum Northwest America. By some accounts the only fertile place.
What a dump.
Okay granted, it looked green enough. And there were plenty of farms scattered about with tended fields that seemed to be doing well, and homesteads with flourishing gardens. Livestock grazing in fenced-in pastures, and farther north larger herds out browsing the open plains while watched over by vigilant cowboys on horseback and enthusiastic ranch dogs.
In fact, if he was being honest it was probably a far better place to run cattle than Trapper's mountain valley back in Utah, which while greener than the desolate area around New Emery half a day away was still no paradise. Not without a lot of hard work, that was.
Tall, green grass as far as the eye could see definitely made finding grazing less of a chore here.
Tabby would love it here, the thought popped unbidden in his mind before he irritably dismissed it. Much as he missed his friend, and thought about her often even after all this time, she was in his past now. She'd made that quite clear when he left.
As for the place he assumed was the town of Lone Valley, shanties and tents and a few proper log cabins, and a reasonably grand Main Street fronted by several businesses, it was pretty good-sized. Maybe a hundred people, two hundred at most. Combine that with the nearby farms and homesteads and the ranches farther north, and you had a larger and more prosperous community than most you saw in a country that had been wracked by shortages, nuclear war, EMP, banditry and lawlessness, and finally foreign invasion in the last twenty or so years.
It was just, well, Skyler had been hearing about this place everywhere. In the last two years since leaving home, all over the Northwest, people talked about it like it was some kind of paradise. A land flowing with milk and honey, big enough to take all comers and offering the first chance at a real life since nukes obliterated most of the habitable regions of the country, leaving them irradiated wastelands.
Of course, if anyone knew all about tall tales when it came to promising a prosperous new place to settle, it was him. He'd been just a kid ten years ago when he'd gone with his mom and the Hendricksons on that long journey to Newpost, Texas. Which had been supposed to be the new hope for a revitalized United States: food coming in from the south, trade, land made fertile by shifting climates from the nuclear winters, all sorts of good things to say about it.
Then again, it might've been all those things if the traders bringing food up from the south hadn't actually been Sangue scouts, and them and their Panteras leaders hadn't been planning on invading to murder or enslave everyone they found.
He wondered what he'd discover about Lone Valley to prove it was too good to be true.
After all, if it was such a prosperous place then why weren't settlers flocking to it like they had been with Newpost? Why weren't trade convoys abandoning less profitable routes to get rich here? Why wasn't the town of Lone Valley ten times as big the way New Emery had boomed after the war ended?
And why hadn't it been folded into the Northern League since it was just a stone's throw from their border and a worthy candidate for entry?
Skyler probably should've asked the League when he'd been up there a year or so ago, cashing in a favor with Kristof to take a peek around their territory for the Hendricksons. It was a long shot, since they'd allowed almost nobody across their borders even during the worst of the war, and of those they did allow most had been forced to leave again once Sangue was pushed back.
He'd just figured that if Lisa's family had been able to keep hold of their livestock, they'd be prosperous enough that the League would want to keep them around. Even the most reclusive and exclusive of places tended to make exceptions when someone wanted to bring wealth in, and the League was no exception; of the refugees who'd been allowed to stay after the war, most had managed to bring enough wealth with them to make them attractive prospective citizens.
Unfortunately, the Hendricksons hadn't been among them.
In any case, during his stay in the Northern League he'd been too focused on looking for his friends to even think about asking after League business, like what they planned to do with Lone Valley. Not that they would've been likely to answer anyway; his dad had become fairly good friends with Kristof, at least as much as anyone could be with that uptight son of a gun, but friendship only went so far.
Even a friendship that had involved the Camptown fighters' help scouring the mountains and the rest of Central and Southern Utah clean of Sangue, mostly as scouts and guides, and had resulted in profitable trade with New Emery for everyone involved.
Well, if there were answers to be had in Lone Valley, he wasn't going to find them just sitting on this hill staring at the place.
Including, he hoped, the answer to the most important question of all: whether Lisa was down there. Was one of those houses or shanties hers? Possibly even one of the fine ranch houses farther north, if her family had managed to keep their herds and grow them over the last five years?
They'd mostly had goats, and he saw a lot of cattle up there, but that didn't have to mean anything. A few cows could become a dozen after five years, couldn't they?
Probably too much to hope for, but that was why he was here.
“What do you think, Junior?” he asked. The stallion snorted and flicked an ear disinterestedly. “Yeah, it doesn't look like much. About the same as a hundred other towns we've been through . . . honestly don't see w
hat the fuss is all about.”
No response this time, which was about what you'd expect when talking to a horse. Skyler sighed and straightened his wide-brimmed hat. “Still, we came all this way so we should probably check it out.” He nudged Junior forward.
There was a road leading to the town. Nothing so fancy as even an asphalt two-lane from before the Ultimatum, since apparently this valley had been unused at that time. Just a rutted track, obviously made by heavy motor vehicles rather than wagons, and trampled for five feet on either side from running livestock along it. Still, his horse seemed to appreciate knowing where he was going.
About a hundred feet short of the first building on Lone Valley's humble Main Street, Skyler slowed Junior and subtly checked the Glock on his hip, then made sure his trusty AK-47 slung across his back was easily accessible. He even loosened the skinning knife in its sheath on his left hip, just in case.
He didn't see any trouble waiting for him in this peaceful town, but that didn't mean there was none lurking.
He'd been through dozens of these frontier towns in the last two years, full of refugees from the war struggling to rebuild their lives after Sangue was driven back south. Some friendly, most wary, some decidedly unfriendly. And if there was one thing he'd learned, it was that most of the skills his mountain man dad had passed down to him had very limited application if he ran into trouble in places like this.
Being able to sneak through underbrush like a ghost, make a killing shot on an elk at 500 yards, butcher the animal and harvest every useful bit of it, cure the hide to make useful things from, build and set a snare, forage for edible plants, and any of a thousand other things Trapper had taught him, well . . .
None of them helped much when a local tough in some ramshackle tavern pulled a gun or knife on him from six feet away. He'd nearly been gutted twice, and had actually taken a grazing shot to the top of his forehead that left a pale scar across his brow and had him seeing double for a week.